There has conventionally and often been conducted such an operation that an optically readable code containing information data is printed and optically read, to thereby display information.
There is an information display system using, as one kind of the optically readable code, a one-dimensional code (barcode) that is affixed to a price tag of a commercial product in advance and is read by an infrared scanner at the time of checkout, to thereby obtain information such as a price thereof.
There is also an information display system in which a two-dimensional matrix code containing specific uniform resource locator (URL) information is printed in advance and is read by a camera of a mobile phone having a code reading function, to thereby guide a user to the link destination URL via the Internet.
Further, there is proposed an icon formed on a medium (Patent Document 1, Abstract). In a system using this icon, in order to recognize various kinds of multimedia information, dots are generated based on a dot code generating algorithm, a dot pattern portion is formed on a medium such as a printed material so that the dots are arrayed following a predetermined rule, the medium is read by reading means to obtain image data, the image data is converted into code data, multimedia information associated with the code data is read from storage means, and the multimedia information is reproduced.